Delta (letter)


Delta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 4. It was derived from the Phoenician letter dalet ?, Letters that come from delta include Latin D and Cyrillic Д.
A river delta is so named because its shape approximates the triangular uppercase letter delta. Despite a popular legend, this use of the word delta was not coined by Herodotus.

Pronunciation

In Ancient Greek, delta represented a voiced dental plosive. In Modern Greek, it represents a voiced dental fricative, like the "th" in "that" or "this". Delta is romanized as d or dh.

Upper case

The uppercase letter Δ is used to denote:
The lowercase letter δ can be used to denote:
These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style.